Monday, August 17, 2015

Turning Abject Surrender Into Virtue

I spent a lot of time driving around this weekend with one of our sons. That's always an enlightening experience because the chap is a deep thinker and pretty well-read. In the process of discussing politics, economics, theology and more, this concept started bubbling around in my head.

Hypothesis: Our modern culture is the result of making a virtue out of capitulation. As usual, I've got less time than I'd like to develop this concept, so let me illustrate it instead. Check out this video from a recent Bernie Sanders event where a small number of crazed screamers managed to shut down one of his campaign events. The real fun starts at 0:50.

I'd argue that this has been happening since the student revolts of the late 60s. From that point on, people with power and chartered to defend learning and civilization have given in to ignorant barbarians armed with little more than loud voices.

These self-defeated invertebrates didn't take responsibility for their failings and publicly admit that they weren't as strong as they should have been. Instead, they created a world view that made a virtue out of surrender. Their positions of power in academia gave their whiny self-justifications an air of intellectual respectability that they never deserved.

The result is multiculti nonsense, the worship of youth, racialist dogma and more. What started as a rout of terrified university administrators, particularly in the Ivy League universities, has become the dominant religion in the US. Its catechism is now taught in almost all public schools and is repeated throughout our popular culture.

This interpretation of the situation explains a lot of things to me, in this case how a major presidential candidate allowed his supporters to be forced to go home without hearing his speech and he's not universally called a poltroon.